America Doesn’t Have Enough Weapons for a Major Conflict. These Workers Know Why.

Capitalism, of course. Every dollar going to an employee doesn't go to a shareholder.

The Lockheed strike was part of a wave of labor unrest that swept America’s military-industrial complex over the past year. On May 1, about 4,000 workers went on strike. Nearly 1,000 of them worked for Lockheed Martin, both at Tejada’s facility in Orlando and at another complex in Denver. It was the first labor strike at the Orlando factory since 1963. Another 3,000 employees went on strike in Hartford, Conn., against Pratt & Whitney, which makes engines and other critical components of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet. In mid-May, about 2,500 employees of General Dynamics nearly went on a strike at a nuclear submarine factory, before reaching a last-minute deal that kept them on the factory line. Last fall, 33,000 workers went on strike at Boeing, affecting production of both commercial and military aircraft and winning a 38 percent pay raise after seven weeks.

Something is going wrong on the assembly lines of America’s arsenal of democracy, and it’s happening at a moment of crisis. The White House, Pentagon and America’s overseas allies are all demanding that defense companies ramp up production to meet the needs of a dangerous geopolitical moment. America is running short of missiles, munitions and battleships. Allies are waiting years for deliveries. Even the Pentagon has to stand in line and wait for delayed shipments of major weapons, like Hellfire missiles, Javelin rocket launchers and sophisticated air defense interceptors. America is trying to surge its military capacity to produce more munitions, missiles and ships, but to do so, it must rely almost entirely on a group of five Fortune 500 defense companies. And none of these companies seem to be on war footing.

Instead of hiring more workers and paying workers more in an effort to retain them, these companies are far more focused on meeting the demands of Wall Street, trying to entice investors and boost their stock price by cutting costs, as well as using billions of dollars in revenue to pay handsome dividends and buy back shares of stock. Last year, for example, Lockheed Martin gave $6.8 billion in buybacks and dividends directly to its shareholders, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of the company’s total revenue and was larger than the $5.3 billion it kept in profits. The same year, RTX (formerly called Raytheon) paid $3.7 billion to shareholders, General Dynamics paid $3 billion and Northrop Grumman paid $3.7 billion. The billions of dollars they send back shareholders each year means that there is less money to go toward paying, hiring or retaining their employees.